Visualizer as an Eclipse RCP application

For those that aren’t aware, InfiniteGraph’s Visualizer is an Eclipse RCP application. Why is this useful information, you ask? Well, this is helpful when you are having problems running the application in a particular environment. So, I’ll be going over how to:

Configure the Visualizer runtime

First, let’s talk about configuration. I have multiple JRE and JDK version/bitness combinations of installs on my machine. So, how do I know which one the Visualizer will use? Also, how can I limit or increase the resources used by the Visualizer application?

In order to modify these runtime properties, you must pass the appropriate parameters to the executable either via the command line or by editing its ini file. For this article, we will assume that we want to persist these changes for this machine, so we want to edit the ini file. The ini file can be found in the visualizer sub-directory of your installation:

installdir/visualizer/IGVisualizer.ini

You can find a list of the JVM properties available to put in this file at Eclipsepedia. For instance, to pass arguments to the JVM (i.e. limit the maximum memory allowed, etc.), you should use the “-vmargs” option. I won’t dive into all of the options available. I am just going to go over the most important option, “-vm”…

Specify the JVM that the Visualizer is run in

Being a native executable, the Visualizer must be run with the appropriate JRE bitness and version (i.e. the IG x64 requires a 64-bit JRE to run the Visualizer and IG x32 requires a 32-bit JRE). In order to specify the particular JVM to run the Visualizer in, you pass the IGVisualizer executable the “-vm” option. This is done by placing the following in your IGVisualizer.ini:

-vm
C:/some/path/to/javaw.exe

It is important to remember this because, as of IG 3.0, the installer now recognizes the appropriate JRE version to use and edits this ini file for you, if a suitable version is found. So, if you take a look at your current ini file, you should find that this option has already been put there for you. If it hasn’t, then don’t worry, the installer wasn’t able to detect the appropriate JRE for you. Specify this now, or just let the Eclipse framework search for the right one.

Why do we do this at install time? Well, in certain combinations of multiple JRE installations, we found that the installer framework recognized an appropriate JRE version to use, whereas, the JRE search path of the Eclipse RCP framework did not. So, we decided that it would be better for us to configure this for you, rather than you being unable to launch the Visualizer after installation.

Again, why do I care about this configuration stuff, if the installer takes care of it for me? Well, if you rename or remove the JRE detected by the installer, you will encounter the following error, when launching the Visualizer:

So, all you have to do, in order to correct this issue, is to edit the IGVisualizer.ini “-vm” argument to specify the path to the renamed or new installation of the appropriate JRE. Or, you can remove the “-vm” argument altogether, in order to see if the Eclipse RCP search can find it for you.

I hope this helps you “configure” the Visualizer application. Feel free to email the Support Team if you have any further questions or comments.